The 26-year-old man who jumped the fence at the White House last week was released Monday and ordered to stick close to his Northern California home until his April court date in Washington, D.C.

Jonathan Tuan-Anh Tran, wearing a backpack and carrying a letter to President Donald Trump, was arrested late Friday in a restricted area on the east side of the White House complex, authorities said in court documents.

President Trump no longer safe in White House: Former Secret Service agent“That just shows the president is not safe there - in the White House. The Secret Service does not have the assets, they don't have personnel on the ground they need to keep him safe.”

Should a group of terrorists decide to storm the White House, the Secret Service would not be able to protect Trump, Bongino predicted.

I bet some in the Secret Service feel the pangs of "have at it" 'bout now. They're secret so they skate no matter what happens.

There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi

Judge Andrew Napolitano, the senior judicial analyst for Fox News, at Trump Tower in December.JIM WATSON / AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGESBy MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUMMARCH 17, 2017Andrew Napolitano was a Superior Court judge in New Jersey until, frustrated by the constraints of his salary, he left the bench for more lucrative pastures: talk radio, a syndicated small-claims court TV series (“Power of Attorney”) and, eventually, Fox News, where he rose to become the network’s senior legal analyst.

It was in that basic-cable capacity this week that Mr. Napolitano managed to set off a cascading scandal, which by Friday had sparked a trans-Atlantic tiff between Britain and the United States while plunging President Trump’s close relationship with Fox News into new, murkier territory.

It was new ground for Mr. Napolitano, 66, who prefers being addressed as “The Judge” and once insisted that Fox News install bookshelves and wood-paneling in his newsroom office, the better to resemble a judge’s chambers.

But Mr. Napolitano’s unlikely leap into global politics can be explained by his friendship with Mr. Trump, whom he met with this year to discuss potential Supreme Court nominees. Mr. Napolitano also has a taste for conspiracy theories, which led him to Larry C. Johnson, a former intelligence officer best known for spreading a hoax about Michelle Obama.

Let’s back up. The saga began on Tuesday on “Fox & Friends,” the chummy morning show, where Mr. Napolitano made a bizarre and unsupported accusation: Citing three unnamed sources, he said that Britain’s top spy agency had wiretapped Mr. Trump on behalf of President Barack Obama during last year’s campaign.

Cable news blather, especially at that hour, usually vanishes at the commercial break. But on Thursday, Mr. Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, repeated the claim from the White House podium, infuriating British officials.

On Friday, Fox News was forced to disavow Mr. Napolitano’s remarks. “Fox News cannot confirm Judge Napolitano’s commentary,” the anchor Shepard Smith said on-air. “Fox News knows of no evidence of any kind that the now-president of the United States was surveilled at any time, any way. Full stop.”

The terse declaration boosted the credibility of Fox News’s newsroom, which is often attacked as biased, but also put it in the awkward position of repudiating one of its featured contributors. And it could threaten the cozy dynamic between Mr. Trump, a frequent Fox viewer, and the network’s conservative hosts.

Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and the prankster Jesse Watters are among the few television personalities to be granted one-on-one interviews with the president. Programs like “Fox & Friends” often serve as cheerleaders for him, and the network is increasing its focus on hard-line conservatism: A new weekly series, hosted by a leader of the Brexit movement, Steve Hilton, will focus on right-wing populism.

Mr. Napolitano, who keeps a residence in Manhattan at Trump International Hotel & Tower on Central Park West, did not respond to inquiries on Friday.

But Mr. Johnson, who was himself once a Fox News contributor, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Napolitano called him on Friday and requested that he speak to The New York Times. Mr. Johnson said he was one of the sources for Mr. Napolitano’s claim about British intelligence.

Mr. Johnson became infamous in political circles after he spread false rumors in 2008 that Michelle Obama had been videotaped using a slur against Caucasians. In the interview on Friday, Mr. Johnson acknowledged his notoriety, but said that his knowledge of surveillance of Mr. Trump came from sources in the American intelligence community. Mr. Napolitano, he said, heard about his information through an intermediary.

“It sounds like a Frederick Forsythe novel,” Mr. Johnson said.

Mr. Trump refused to back down from the claims on Friday, and even praised Mr. Napolitano, telling reporters, “All we did was quote a very talented legal mind.”

The president’s next scheduled appearance on Fox News is Saturday night, when an interview will air between him and Mr. Watters, a host known for on-the-street interviews that have been denounced as offensive and, at times, racist.

In a clip released on Friday, Mr. Watters asks Mr. Trump which celebrity he would most like to fire: Alec Baldwin, Senator Chuck Schumer or CNN’s president, Jeff Zucker.

Larry C Johnson, who made bogus charges that Michelle Obama made a racist speech against white people and that former Secretary of State John Kerry had raped women while serving in Vietnam, has emerged as one of the key figures behind what has become an international diplomatic confrontation between the US and UK.

On 6 March, the week after Mr Trump first accused Mr Obama of being responsible for the wiretap, Mr Johnson “revealed” in an interview with Russian state sponsored network Russia Today that there was a conspiracy between US intelligence and “Britain’s own GHCQ (sic)” to derail Donald Trump’s election campaign. He said he had repeated this to Andrew Napolitano, a retired judge, who made it a basis for his own accusation against Mr Obama and GCHQ on Fox News earlier this week. The falsehood was then given further exposure by Sean Spicer, Mr Trump’s spokesman, at a White House briefing, on Thursday.

The revelation about Mr Johnson’s role in the extraordinary affair came as the Trump administration dismissed an account by Theresa May’s official spokesperson that they had apologised and pledged not to repeat the GCHQ claim.

Asked about the issue at a joint press conference with visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mr Trump replied: “We said nothing. All we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind who was the one responsible for saying that on television, I didn’t make an opinion on it. You shouldn’t be talking to me. You should be talking to Fox.”

Mr Spicer denied reports from No 10 that he had apologised. “I don’t think we regret anything,” he stressed. “As the President said, I was just reading off media reports.”

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, meanwhile, was busy distancing itself from the “very talented legal mind” Mr Napolitano. Anchor Shepherd Smith said “Fox News knows of no evidence of any kind that the now President of the United States was surveilled at any time, anyway. Full stop.”

Mr Napolitano, who knows Mr Trump and has an apartment at Trump International Hotel & Tower in New York, was said to be lying low today. But Mr Johnson came forward to say that he was one of the sources for the GCHQ story. Mr Johnson maintained that his own knowledge of the matter came from the American intelligence community. “It sounds like a Frederick Forsyth novel,” he said.

Mr Johnson has been accused of mixing fact with fiction before. In 2008 he claimed on his blog that a tape existed of Michelle Obama “railing against whitey” at a church. Although he had not seen the tape himself, he said, “five other sources” had and it was being held by the Republicans “to drop at the appropriate time”. No such tape was released and no evidence was ever produced to prove its existence. The Obama campaign’s “Fight the Smears” website declared that the allegations were an invention.

In 2013, in another blog post, Mr Johnson falsely accused John Kerry of sexual assault, claiming that he had “raped some poor Vietnamese woman” in Vietnam. The assertion came from a TV debate in 1971 which had been edited and altered to make Mr Kerry say “I personally raped for pleasure”. When the manipulation was pointed out by readers of the blog he deleted the article. No apology was ever offered.

Meanwhile Rick Ledgett, the deputy director of NSA, the American counterpart of GCHQ, described the claims about Mr Obama and British intelligence as “arrant nonsense”. He pointed that the allegation betrayed “a complete lack of understanding in how the relationship works” between Britain and the US on intelligencehttp://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 36996.html

Well we know he could shoot someone on 5th Ave and not lose a vote. I think idiot sociopaths are always just itching to take their gun on a real life test drive.

As an aside, I once held a pistol at a friend's house and put it down right away. It felt like pure evil in my hands. I dunno. I was young but I was like yeah, no, I'll never own a gun.

What would be cool though is if trump called for a paintball battle on the WH lawn.

There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi

Nazi-Themed Trump Billboard To Stay Up As Long As He’s President, Owner Says

The billboard space was provided by the owner, Beatrice Moore, who 12 News reported has offered to showcase the work for the remainder of Trump’s presidency.

This anti-Trump billboard in Arizona has drawn heated opinions about its design, some who say its Nazi imagery goes too far.On the back of the billboard, there’s another message. It reads “unity” both in English and in sign language.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ant ... 9d29dcb8c6

New York Attorney General Steps Up Scrutiny of White HouseMarch 19, 2017 By Erica OrdenEric Schneiderman hires a public-corruption prosecutor to target the Trump administrationNew York state’s attorney general, to date one of the most vocal antagonists of President Donald Trump, is preparing to escalate his office’s litigation against the president’s administration.

Democrat Eric Schneiderman has hired one of the top public-corruption prosecutors under former Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara to focus specifically on issues involving the Trump administration. Howard Master, who prosecuted the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s case against longtime New York state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver , is...

Lovely to see CounterPunch finally posting about the evils of trumpty dumbty

MARCH 17, 2017Trump’s New Era of Militarism and Mendacityby MELVIN GOODMAN

There is no better introduction to the militarism and callousness of the Trump era than the budget proposal for 2018. Much has been written about the miserly cuts to Meals on Wheels, housing aid, and other community assistance, but it’s just as important to examine the unjustified and unnecessary increases in defense spending. The Trump budget is clearly designed to enable another cycle of militarized national security policy and, in the words of Steve Bannon, to “deconstruct the administrative state.”

In April 1953, soon after the death of Joseph Stalin, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his “cross of Iron” speech, warning against “destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.” Eisenhower wanted to avoid the enormous domestic price that would accompany unwarranted military spending. And military spending, he emphasized, meant “spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” This is exactly what Trump is calling for in a federal budget that takes direct aim at scientific and medical research, the endowments for the arts and humanities, and the block grants for food and housing support. Even the Department of Energy’s tiny program to help insulate the houses of the poor would be eliminated.

Meanwhile, the over-financed military will received an increase of $54 billion, which is equal to the former budget of the Department of State as well as the entire defense budget of Russia. Defense spending and procurement should be linked to actual threats to the United States, which faces no existential threat. If this were done, Trump’s administration would have to take into account that the United States is the only whitleblowerciacountry in the world with a global military presence that can project air and naval power to every far corner. The Russian navy is an operational backwater, and the Chinese navy is a regional one, not global. There is no air force to rival the U.S. Air Force, and no other country has huge military bases the world over or even access to countless ports and anchorages. As a result, no other country has used lethal military power so often and so far from its borders in pursuit of dubious security interests.

The sad reality is that every aspect of the Pentagon’s budget, including research and development, procurement, operations and maintenance, and infrastructure, could be scrutinized for additional savings. The excessive spending on the Air Force is the most wasteful of all military expenditures. The Air Force is obsessed with fighter superiority in an era without a threat. The Air Force has not been threatened by air power since the end of the Second World War, and the U.S. Air Force holds an advantage over any combination of air powers. There was no adversary for the F-22, the world’s most effective and lethal air-to-air combat aircraft, but the program was killed in 2011 to make way for the more costly and contentious F-35, the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons program. Even Senator John McCain (R-AZ) referred to the program as a “train wreck.”

As with the Air Force and its dominance of the skies, the Navy has had total dominance at sea since the end of the Second World War. Even the chief of naval operations concedes that the United States enjoys a “degree of overmatch [with any potential adversary] that is extraordinary.” The Navy has its own air force, its own army, and its own strategic weapons, and it is equal in size to all the navies of the world combined. The Navy has a subordinate organization, the Coast Guard, which represents the world’s seventh-largest fleet. Second to the F-35 nightmare is the worst-case costs for the next generation of aircraft carriers, which Donald Trump inadvertently highlighted when he toured the USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s most expensive warship at $14 billion. China’s success with inexpensive anti-ship missiles questions the strategic suitability of U.S. aircraft carriers.

The very existence of the Marine Corps, which has more planes, ships, armored vehicles, and personnel than the entire British military, is questionable. The Marines have not conducted an amphibious landing in 65 years, and there is no other nation in the world that has such a Corps in terms of numbers and capabilities. The Marines’ V-22 Osprey, a futuristic vertical takeoff and landing hybrid aircraft is neither reliable nor safe, and even President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney tried to kill the program 25 years ago. The Marine version of the F-35, with an expensive and unwieldy vertical take-off and landing program, should be canceled.

The budget proposal does not address how the Pentagon would spend its latest windfall, but surely there will be unneeded increases for our huge nuclear force, which could be significantly reduced. Other nuclear powers such as Britain, France, China, and even Israel, India, and Pakistan, believe that 200-300 nuclear weapons are sufficient for deterrence. Several years ago two U.S. Air Force officers wrote an authoritative essay that pointed specifically to 331 nuclear weapons as providing an assured deterrence capability. But Russia and the United States have thousands of warheads; Russian President Vladimir wants to cut the inventory, but Donald Trump wants to keep building. Trump had to interrupt a phone call with Putin last month in order to learn about the New START Treaty that the Kremlin would like to use as a stepping stone to a round of deeper cuts in the U.S. and Russian arsenals. Trump was uninterested.

President Eisenhower was spot-on in describing the social costs of defense spending and in warning that “humanity was hanging from a cross of iron.” In view of the counterproductive use of U.S. military power over the past two decades in North Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia, cutting the defense budget would be a realistic way to begin to reduce the operational tempo of the U.S. military, control the deficit, and reorder U.S. priorities. The United States is in an arms race with itself; it must be stopped.http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/17/ ... mendacity/

Trump is the real thing. His budget proposal, now made public, is perfectly expected, an increase of 10% for military spending, 7%, homeland security, 6%, veterans, and the largest cuts, -31% EPA, -29% State department and development agencies, -21% agriculture. This of course tells us little about the deformation of government allocations and still less about overall purpose. On its face, we see militarism crushing down government’s welfare functions, and this should be a clue as to what’s at stake.

As NYT reports, “The proposal would also eliminate funding [I stress, eliminate] for nearly 20 smaller independent agencies, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Legal Services Corporation, which finances legal aid groups.” The list (more below) is instructive. The reason is given to be, avoiding deficits while increasing the defense budget necessitates pruning the tree. The preeminence of defense requires nothing less, if the Homeland is to remain safe. Trump is the ultimate protector of American democracy and freedom.

At a minimum, from recent polls, 40% of the American public buys in—totally and completely, as the response to Trump’s speeches make clear, with probably another 20% on the borderline, sharing the nativist biases and xenophobic fears. This leaves a scant 40% as an opposition force (and even there, a Democratic party weak, patriotism-saturated, hardly confrontational with standards of contemporary political discourse, as on defense per se, the Cold War, toleration of dissent). In this case, predisposition to fascism, a uniform political-cultural trend since the end of World War Two, renders Trump practicable, intelligible, and for a near-majority of the public desirable. Fascism as a top-down affair cannot succeed without the underlying groundwork of receptivity.

Nevertheless, Trump has crossed the Rubicon, a recipient of history in America but also self-propelled in taking over. A healthy America never would have tolerated his advancement and acquiescence in his ideas. For they are harsh, repulsive to a democratic sensibility and belief-system, one-dimensional in the veneration of stripped-down national power combined with, and meaningless without, unrestrained capitalism, achievable by whatever means. That alone qualifies for consideration of fascism, not simply the militarist cum monopoly capital core of society, but the underlying means for achievement, the interpenetration of government and business as the polity’s defining mode.

America since 1945 has overstressed expansion, both geopolitical and market-oriented, as much co-responsible for the inception of the Cold War as the Soviet Union, and with the Korean War (which came remarkably early, 1950), its leading architect and beneficiary, so that by Vietnam, anticommunism, the operative catchword all those years, had been fully actualized as the move for unilateral dominance. This has not changed, the impulse only intensified in the interim. Perhaps instability and under-performance are integral to advanced capitalism, yet something more sinister is involved, a self-fulfilling motivation—a preservation-instinct (?)—which transcends economic ambitions and political fears, directed to a hardening personality structure contemptuous of, even frightened of—human needs and feelings. This corresponds to the requisite mindset sanctioning attitudes toward war, fortress-building, intolerance, and setting America straight on the course of global counterrevolution, none of which would be existing, possible, acceptable under an authentic expression of political-economic freedom.

I would like to look here at the proposed budget, for it indicates my thesis: beyond militarism and capitalism, but deriving from their consequent integration in today’s America, there is an eradicative disposition, absolutistic in character, to eliminate all traces of presumed softness (as defined by a growing majority, including, regrettably, the working class) from American life, that which pertains to peace, reduction of class differences thereby approaching a condition of equality, realization of respect for the individual, at bottom, an ethos of caring through meeting the health needs, as a matter of right, of society’s members, broadly interpreted beyond decent jobs and housing to the environmental well-being, protection, replenishment of the planet.

America is in the forefront of its desecration. My concern is not the big-ticket items, which are transparent to all, starting with the military, encouragement of capital accumulation, and the weakening of EPA, but the microscopic items, which are a telling guide to the settling mood of antihuman deep-seated conviction. Even the meager list thus far: why eliminate NEA or NEH unless the intuitive fear of reaching a true flourishing human identity has taken hold? I once more than a half-century ago wrote an essay for Agricultural History entitled “Fear of Man.” Add to that “Woman,” as at bottom the fear of human emancipation from the thralldom of institutionalized repression, glaringly evident in the machinery of foreign and domestic policy, and you have the picture: a vindictiveness toward anyone or anything not only threatening but also questioning the established verities, imperialism and extreme wealth-differentiation.

Let’s look closer at this nihilistic (denial of any objective ground of moral truths, destruction as desirable for its own sake, definitions offered by Webster’s Collegiate) mindset, as it translates into Trump’s proposed budget, the hatred of human potentiality wherever humankind, and here America in particular, becomes awakened, realized, or even begins to rear its head. EPA is easy in the account: elimination of one-fifth of the agency’s personnel, funding for the Clean Power Act, and climate change research. What kind of small mind tears apart what is beneficial to society, down to research? On State and development programs, we see in The Times chart and explanation, an attack on the UN: “Climate change initiatives … would lose all their U.S. funding,” other programs manhandled, as meanwhile “Israel’s $3.1 billion in annual military aid would be untouched.”

And so on (again, NYT throughout for information). Agriculture—I stress the vicious cutting out of humanly-deserving programs, here a reduction in the National Forest System and elimination of “loan and grant programs for water and sewage systems.” Next, Labor: scaling back “on a number of job training programs, including those aimed at helping seniors, disadvantaged young people and unemployed Americans.” Justice: budget cutting (-$4B), “even as he [Trump] steps up border enforcement, hires more immigration judges and slightly increases the F.B. I. budget.” Here things become grizzly from any democratic standpoint, Health and Human Services: “eliminating $4.2 billion in community service programs like the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program,” and cuts of 18% to the National Institutes of Health, in both of these cases, needing a mad Dr. Frankenstein with sharpened scalpel to ferret out such cuts.

Commerce, like the others, fares poorly: “The budget eliminates the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s grants and programs for coastal and marine management, research and education and eliminates the Minority Business and Development Agency, which supports minority-owned businesses.” Education: emphasis on school-choice programs, “while eliminating funding for before- and after-school and summer programs,” along with eliminating “the Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant” for college students “with the greatest need for financial aid,” a further instance, if one were needed, for contempt shown the poor—and designed to make them remain that way. Transportation: initiating “privatization of the nation’s air traffic control operations,” as well as reducing subsidies to Amtrak.

The list is long and suggests a thoroughness leaving little untouched that benefits the public, a merciless dissection on Trump’s part (I use him as responsible, but much of this is scraping the barrel of reactionary figures, in every case favorable administrators, appointed for that reason, and expected to follow in the same vein as the butchering of social welfare continues). Thus, pointedly, Housing and Urban Development: “The budget would eliminate the Community Development Block Grant Program, which funds local improvement efforts and anti-poverty programs, and cut funding for rental assistance and homeownership programs and affordable housing initiatives.” Interior, simplicity itself: “increase funding for programs that drill for oil and gas on public lands and cut funding for programs such as the National Heritage Areas and the National Wildlife Refuge Fund.”

All to increase funding for the military? Of course, but also, as the examples testify, the urge to despoil, ruin, pillage, liberate the darkness of vitriol built-up through the institutional influence and development of war, intervention, militarism, and the fragmentation of human feeling (alienation) associated with capitalism. Energy: some budget cutting, but “an increase of $1.4 billion, or 11 percent, to the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is focused on managing the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal.” (Hardly a peaceful pursuit.) In addition, “the budget would cut or eliminate programs to support research of breakthrough clean energy technology….” Treasury: the IRS would be “the main target,” although I should have liked more coverage to taxation and fiscal policies. Veterans Affairs: a hefty 6% increase, as in extending the Veterans Choice Program (choosing options outside V.A. facilities).

And finally, Homeland Security and Defense. The former is cut-and-dried: $2.6B for “border security and technology, including the early stages of a wall between the United States and Mexico.” There would be a budget set aside for more Border Patrol agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel. Also, “another $1,5 billion would go toward supporting the detention and removal of illegal immigrants.” And the latter, faced with a budgetary increase of $52.3B, The Times throws up its arms in despair of accurately enumerating, the increase being still left vague by Trump. What is not vague, however, is the drift of policy making. In every case, America is internally stripped down, impoverished of its national heritage. To say, this is all for the sake of budget balancing (the better to serve military needs) is only partially true; what we are witnessing as well is a punitive thirst, the urge to punish, even among large portions of the population struggling in present economic circumstances, and wholly in defiance of their objective class interests, i.e., punishment for being a free people.http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/17/ ... -revealed/

On a heavily protected military base some 15 miles south of Washington, D.C., sits the massive headquarters of a spy agency few know exists. Even Barack Obama, five months into his presidency, seemed not to have recognized its name. While shaking hands at a Five Guys hamburger restaurant in Washington in May 2009, he asked a customer seated at a table about his job. “What do you [do]?” the president inquired. “I work at NGA, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency,” the man answered. Obama appeared dumbfounded. “So, explain to me exactly what this National Geospatial…” he said, unable to finish the name. Eight years after that videotape aired, the NGA remains by far the most shadowy member of the Big Five spy agencies, which include the CIA and the National Security Agency.

Despite its lack of name recognition, the NGA’s headquarters is the third-largest building in the Washington metropolitan area, bigger than the CIA headquarters and the U.S. Capitol.

Completed in 2011 at a cost of $1.4 billion, the main building measures four football fields long and covers as much ground as two aircraft carriers. In 2016, the agency purchased 99 acres in St. Louis to construct additional buildings at a cost of $1.75 billion to accommodate the growing workforce, with 3,000 employees already in the city.

The NGA is to pictures what the NSA is to voices. Its principal function is to analyze the billions of images and miles of video captured by drones in the Middle East and spy satellites circling the globe. But because it has largely kept its ultra-high-resolution cameras pointed away from the United States, according to a variety of studies, the agency has never been involved in domestic spy scandals like its two far more famous siblings, the CIA and the NSA. However, there’s reason to believe that this will change under President Donald Trump.

Throughout the long election campaign and into his first months as president, Trump has pushed hard for weakening restraints on the intelligence agencies, spending more money for defense, and getting tough on law and order. Given the new president’s overwhelming focus on domestic security, it’s reasonable to expect that Trump will use every tool available to maintain it, including overhead vigilance.

In March 2016, the Pentagon released the results of an investigation initiated by the Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General to examine military spy drones in the United States. The report, marked “For Official Use Only” and partially redacted, revealed that the Pentagon used unarmed surveillance drones over American soil on fewer than 20 occasions between 2006 and 2015. (Although the report doesn’t identify the nature of the missions, another Pentagon document lists 11 domestic drone operations that principally involved natural disasters, search and rescue, and National Guard training.)

The investigation also quoted from an Air Force law review article pointing out the growing concern that technology designed to spy on enemies abroad may soon be turned around to spy on citizens at home. “As the nation winds down these wars … assets become available to support other combatant command (COCOM) or U.S. agencies, the appetite to use them in the domestic environment to collect airborne imagery continues to grow.”

Although the report stated that all missions were conducted within full compliance of the law, it pointedly noted that as of 2015 there were no standardized federal statutes that “specifically address the employment of the capability provided by a DoD UAS (unmanned aircraft system) if requested by domestic civil authorities.” Instead, there is a Pentagon policy governing reconnaissance drones that requires the secretary of defense to approve all such domestic operations. Under these regulations, drones “may not conduct surveillance on U.S. persons” unless permitted by law and approved by the secretary. The policy also bans armed drones over the United States for anything other than military training and weapons testing.

In 2016, unbeknownst to many city officials, police in Baltimore began conducting persistent aerial surveillance using a system developed for military use in Iraq. Few civilians have any idea how advanced these military eye-in-the-sky drones have become. Among them is ARGUS-IS, the world’s highest-resolution camera with 1.8 billion pixels. Invisible from the ground at nearly four miles in the air, it uses a technology known as “persistent stare”— the equivalent of 100 Predator drones peering down at a medium-size city at once—to track everything that moves.

With the capability to watch an area of 10 or even 15 square miles at a time, it would take just two drones hovering over Manhattan to continuously observe and follow all outdoor human activity, night and day. It can zoom in on an object as small as a stick of butter on a plate and store up to 1 million terabytes of data a day. That capacity would allow analysts to look back in time over days, weeks, or months. Technology is in the works to enable drones to remain aloft for years at a time.

The Department of Homeland Security has been at these crossroads before. In 2007, during the presidency of George W. Bush, the department established an agency to direct domestic spy satellite stakeouts and gave it a bland name: the National Applications Office. But Congress, concerned about a “Big Brother in the Sky,” cut off funding. In 2009, it was killed by the Obama administration.

Still, unlike domestic electronic surveillance by the NSA, which has been closely scrutinized and subjected to legislation designed to protect civil liberties, domestic overhead spying has escaped the attention of both Congress and the public. The Trump administration may take advantage of that void.

Initiating a new age of “persistent surveillance,” Trump could use the spy world’s overhead assets to target Muslims or members of Black Lives Matter. The president has spoken in favor of increasing the scrutiny of mosques; aerial assessment would allow him to track worshippers. Drones could aid in the mass roundup of illegal immigrants intended for deportation, and Trump has said he may send federal forces to Chicago to quell the violence. Drones could offer the city the unblinking eye for 24/7 vigilance.

Of course, all that would require a significant expansion of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to analyze the domestic imagery. Before that can happen, Trump, like Obama, has to discover there is such an agency.

Few people in the Republican Party have done more to limit voting rights than Hans von Spakovsky. He’s been instrumental in spreading the myth of widespread voter fraud and backing new restrictions to make it harder to vote.

But it appears that von Spakovsky had an admirer in Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, according to e-mails released to the Senate Judiciary Committee covering Gorsuch’s time working in the George W. Bush Administration.

When President Bush nominated von Spakovksy to the Federal Election Commission in late 2005, Gorsuch wrote, “Good for Hans!”

In another e-mail, when von Spakovksy said he was participating in a “Ballot Access and Voter Integrity Conference” at the Justice Department, Gorsuch wrote, “Sounds interesting. Glad to see you’re doing this. I may try to attend some of it.” Though the Justice Department was supposed to investigate both voting discrimination and voter fraud, the latter cause took priority and eventually led to Republican US Attorneys’ being wrongly fired from their jobs for refusing to prosecute fraud cases.

At very least, the e-mails suggest Gorsuch was friendly with von Spakovksy. But it’s far more disturbing if Gorsuch shares Von Spakovsky’s views on voting rights. Given that we know almost nothing about Gorsuch’s views on the subject, this is something the Senate needs to press him on during confirmation hearings next week.

Though the e-mails sound mundane, they’re much more important when you consider what was happening at the Justice Department during the time Gorsuch overlapped with von Spakovksy. In 2005–06 Gorsuch was principal deputy to the associate attorney general and von Spakosvky was special counsel to Brad Schlozman, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, who said he wanted to “gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the [voting] section.” It was a time when longtime civil-rights lawyers were pushed out of the Justice Department and the likes of Schlozman and von Spakovsky reversed the Civil Rights Division’s traditional role of safeguarding voting rights. When von Spakovsky was nominated to the FEC, six former lawyers in the voting section called him “the point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.”

In particular, von Spakovsky manipulated the process to approve Georgia’s strict voter-ID law in 2005, which was among the first of its kind. (I tell this story in great detail in my book Give Us the Ballot.) Von Spakovsky had been an advocate of such laws nationally and in Georgia specifically, where he was from, since the 1990s. “Requiring official picture identification such as a driver’s license with a current address would immediately cut down on a large amount of fraud,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 1995. Two years later, he recommended, “Georgia should require all potential voters to present reliable photo identifications at their polling locations to help prevent impostors from voting.”

Georgia’s voter-ID law was submitted to the Justice Department in 2005 under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required states like Georgia with a long history of voting discrimination to approve their voting changes with the federal government. The sponsor of the law, Republican Representative Sue Burmeister, told department lawyers, “If there are fewer black voters because of the bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud. She said when black voters in her precinct are not paid to vote, they do not go to the polls.”

Her racially inflammatory assertions set off alarm bells among the team reviewing the submission, indicating that the law may have been enacted with a discriminatory purpose. Department lawyers feared the bill would disenfranchise thousands of voters.

Atlanta’s Mayor, Shirley Franklin, told the story of her 84-year-old mother, who had recently moved from Philadelphia to Atlanta and could not obtain a new photo ID for voting. Her expired Pennsylvania driver’s license was rejected as sufficient documentation to obtain a Georgia ID card, and she was told to produce a copy of her birth certificate. But Franklin’s mother had been born at home in North Carolina and, like many elderly African Americans who grew up during Jim Crow, never had a birth certificate. After voting for 40 years, she would be disenfranchised by the new law.

Citing the high number of voters without ID, the disparate rates of ID possession among blacks and whites, the number of DMV offices that did not issue IDs, the cost of the ID and the underlying documents needed to obtain an ID (ranging from $20 for an ID card to $210 for naturalization papers), four of five members of the Georgia review team urged that the law be rejected under Section 5. “While no single piece of data confirms that blacks will [be] disparately impacted compared to whites, the totality of evidence points to that conclusion,” they wrote in a 51-page analysis.

Yet von Spakovsky placed a conservative lawyer on the review team, Joshua Rogers, who argued that the law should be approved. Von Spakovsky began secretly e-mailing Rogers copies of his articles, and arguments and analysis in favor of the Georgia ID law. He told him to password protect his computer so that no other attorneys on the team could see their correspondence. “They chose to put him on the case because of his political leanings and personal connection with von Spakovsky,” said Heather Moss, a member of the review team. Rogers’s dissenting memo, which was drafted with von Spakovsky’s input, became the basis for the Justice Department’s preclearance of the law.

A year later, when von Spakovsky was nominated to the FEC, it was revealed that he published a law article praising voter-ID laws under the pseudonym “Publius” just a week after Georgia submitted its law for review. The article in the Texas Review of Law & Politics, a conservative legal journal, was titled “Securing the Integrity of American Elections: The Need for Change” and its author was identified as “an attorney who specializes in election issues.” Publius, aka von Spakovsky, wrote: “It is unfortunately true that in the great democracy in which we live, voter fraud has had a long and studied role in our elections,” the article began. It continued: “putting security measures in place— such as requiring identification when voting— does not disenfranchise voters and there is no evidence to suggest otherwise.”

THE STAKES ARE HIGHER NOW THAN EVER. GET THE NATION IN YOUR INBOX.

DOJ ethics guidelines clearly stated that von Spakovsky, given his longstanding advocacy for voter-ID laws and the strong viewpoints in his then-anonymous article, should have recused himself from consideration of Georgia’s law. Indeed, his ethical lapses and deceptive support for new voting restrictions were a major reason Senate Democrats blocked his nomination to the FEC and President Bush was forced to give him a recess appointment. (Then-Senator Barack Obama put a hold on von Spakovsky’s nomination and he withdrew in 2008, joining the Heritage Foundation, which has championed Gorsuch’s nomination.)

But that’s not all. In addition to the FEC, Von Spakovsky was also appointed to the advisory board of the Election Assistance Commission, created by the Help America Vote Act to analyze the country’s election problems. The commission hired two well- respected experts, Republican Job Serebrov and Democrat Tova Wang, to produce a comprehensive study on voter fraud. “There is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud, or at least much less than is claimed, including voter impersonation, ‘dead’ voters, non-citizen voting and felon voters,” a draft of the report stated. After von Spakovsky complained to the commission’s GOP leadership, the wording in the final report was changed to, “There is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.”

More recently, von Spakovsky has argued against that the Voting Rights Act was “constitutionally dubious at the time of its enactment” and praised Trump’s promised investigation into voter fraud, which has been widely panned by Democrats and Republicans. “The real problem in our election system is that we don’t really know to what extent President Trump’s claim is true because we have an election system that is based on the honor system,” he wrote with John Fund after Trump said with no evidence that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally.

Given that von Spakovsky hailed Gorsuch as “the perfect pick for Trump,” it’s safe to assume he believes that the Supreme Court nominee shares his views. The Senate needs to aggressively question Gorsuch to see if that’s the case.

Gorsuch has already cited Justice Antonin Scalia as a role model, who said the Voting Rights Act had led to a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” Gorsuch, if confirmed, could be the deciding vote on whether to weaken the remaining sections of the VRA and whether to uphold discriminatory voter-ID laws and redistricting plans from states like North Carolina and Texas. In many ways, the fate of voting rights in the United States hangs on this nomination.

Schneiderman’s decision to hire Howard Master reportedly signals that he plans to target Trump and his administration. Master previously served under Bharara, who was fired after refusing to resign at Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s request.

Master worked on high-profile cases at the Department of Justice, including the prosecution of New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

Eric Soufer, a spokesman for Schneiderman, confirmed the hire to the Journal.

“[He] will be working on a wide range of civil and criminal investigations and enforcement matters, including public corruption, complex civil litigation,” Soufer said.The White House did not immediately respond to the Journal’s request for comment.

Schneiderman has a history with Trump, including a fraud lawsuit in 2013 over the billionaire's now-defunct real estate school, Trump University.

The New York attorney general also recently joined colleagues in other states in challenges to Trump’s immigration ban and climate change plans.

Schneiderman’s office just last week joined the lawsuit by Washington state against the Trump’s revised immigration ban.

Monitoring /pol/ and various trumpist IRC chats and subreddits has been a real drain on my psyche lately.

The vague classification of threats posed by trump supporters is troubling but I'm still not seeing a whole lot of evidence of mass organization or mobilization, other than in the usual channels where that has always been the mode of operation.

Interesting because the world of mainstream propaganda swirls all around and barely even touches the world of the supporter. Even Rockefeller's death prompted mostly rumors of Soros's health. Only simple tracks.

None of this is novel but it's becoming perceptibly difficult to predict what's going to happen on Saturday here and all around the country.

The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler

The vague classification of threats posed by trump supporters is troubling but I'm still not seeing a whole lot of evidence of mass organization or mobilization, other than in the usual channels where that has always been the mode of operation.

Interesting because the world of mainstream propaganda swirls all around and barely even touches the world of the supporter. Even Rockefeller's death prompted mostly rumors of Soros's health. Only simple tracks.

None of this is novel but it's becoming perceptibly difficult to predict what's going to happen on Saturday here and all around the country.

Uuuuuuuuhhhh... I'm probably missing something I should know, but what is happening on Saturday (March 25)?

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:I am by virtue of its might divine,The highest Wisdom and the first Love.